The Poison Oracle

by Peter Dickinson

  “Suddenly he became very interested in the zoo, and inspected every detail. I think he had not thought of doing the murders there until he came one morning and saw the Sultan playing with the spring-guns. The marshmen throw their spears with a spear-thrower, so a spring-gun is quite a close parallel. He found two men, who were far too good to be zoo slaves. That morning they came to the zoo early and hid the gun and recorder among the reeds—indeed Maj became very angry when my ape started to throw the reeds about. Then bin Zair came to the zoo with papers for me to work on, so that I had to go to my office. He insisted that the door should be close guarded, so that there was no question of anybody else having done the killing—though he did not then know the Frankish woman was still in the zoo. He told the Sultan some tale which would persuade him to walk down into the lower gallery, and he gave Dyal tobacco to chew with poison in it—something very quick-acting, a cyanide capsule, perhaps. He knew that Dyal would not eat it in the Sultan’s presence but that he was very much addicted and would chew it as soon as he could. Bin Zair must have been alarmed to see the Frankish woman still in the zoo, but Dyal was already dead, so he was forced to continue his plan.

  “As soon as she was out of sight he started the tape-recorder—perhaps he pretended he had brought the Sultan down there to listen to it—and when the ape-noises began he struck the Sultan with the hypodermic dart. If he struck accurately into that vein the anaesthetic would act in two seconds, and the ape-noises would conceal any shout or scuffle. The poison would take some hours to act—I ought to have noticed that Dyal died quickly and with a contorted face and the Sultan slowly and peacefully. And yet they were supposed to have died of the same poison.

  “Then bin Zair came to my office, saying that the Sultan had struck him—to account for any noises I might have heard—and waited for the recording of the two shots. We rushed out and found the Sultan’s body, but my ape had taken the dart and used it to attack an enemy ape, who later also died. Then bin Zair ran round to the upper gallery, where he struck Dyal’s dead body with another dart, and hid the remainder of the tobacco.

  “So died my friend the Sultan. And all at once very many Arabs came from nowhere out of the sands, as though knowing that some such thing was about to happen . . .”

  Suddenly there was uproar. Hitherto the Arabs had listened with an intentness that would have been more reassuring if Morris hadn’t known how eagerly Arabs will listen to any accusation, however incredible, for the sake of retelling it later round some camp fire. There were hands on belt-daggers, and implausible cries of innocence. Ostentatiously Morris turned his head towards the guns as if ready to give a signal, but the Council calmed itself.

  “There was a rumour,” said the dour sheikh, “that the marsh-men were planning to attack the palace. Fuad brought the news to my tents . . .”

  “And he is bin Zair’s father’s cousin’s wife’s brother’s grandson,” added someone—a piece of instant desert genealogy that brought grunts of confirmation.

  “Fuad told me that if there was war the Arabs could take the marshes and drain them and profit from good fresh land and the oil beneath; therefore, being loyal to my Sultan, I drove across the desert though I had my camels on good grazing.”

  “But the marshmen knew nothing of any such attack,” said Morris. “Whence came this rumour? Furthermore, whence came the bombs and napalm in so few days, with two good aeroplanes and experienced pilots? Such things take time to find, unless a man knows in advance that they will be needed and is friends with an international oil company. Note also that it was bin Zair who persuaded me to go to the marshes at all, after I had begun to suggest doubts about his story; and lo, when I return to the palace it is already known that I am dead . . .”

  Morris allowed his voice to tail away. There were a few more loose ends he could have tied in, but he didn’t want to muddle his case with complexities. To calm himself he started to pick his way along the fur of Dinah’s fore-arm. She cradled herself close to him, crooning slightly. The Arabs evidently recognised the dramatic moment and waited without snivel or cough for bin Zair to begin. He took his time, but at last he sighed an old man’s patient sigh.

  “Morris has spoken,” he said. “Now I must collect my wits. You must understand that I did not come to the Council expecting to hear so mad an accusation. I am surprised that Morris did not add that I flew to the zoo on the back of a winged lion and that these poisons were fetched for me by the djinns at my command. Alas, I am an old man. I loved my master. I served him many years. I crawled many times to his feet. How should I kill him? But lo, you listen like children round their grandmother to this wild tale. And there is no evidence here, save the word of Morris. He says he saw this, he heard this; he brings a tape, which he says he found in such-and-such a place, and there are noises on it. But perhaps he put the noises there himself. He says the marshmen knew of no plot, but he alone speaks their language—how shall his tale be tested. He says I slew my master. Who saw me do this? No man, says the Lord Morris, this story-teller, and here at least he speaks truth.”

  This was a strong point. The Arabs, even more than other people, prefer the evidence of the most drunken, short-sighted, corrupt and biassed witness to that of the most coherent net of circumstantial reasoning.

  “No man saw you, bin Zair,” said Morris. “But my ape did.”

  “And how shall it bear witness?” cried someone.

  “Thus,” said Morris, releasing Dinah and spilling the counters into the lid of his wallet.

  “Are we all crazed,” cried bin Zair, “to listen to such nonsense?”

  “We will listen,” said Hadiq. “I have seen how this ape makes words. My friends, it is true. Morris will explain.”

  “Ai!” said a fat sheikh. “Let us at least see, and then we can decide. It will be news to tell, certainly.”

  Everyone agreed with that. News is a valuable commodity in the desert, and to be present at the beginning of a fresh piece of news—the birth of someone’s son, the theft of a camel, a quarrel over grazing, a record bag by a famous hawk—makes a man welcome in many tents.

  “Now see,” said Morris. “Dinah cannot speak. Her mouth and tongue are not of human shape. She can make a few signs with her hands, as a deaf-and-dumb person does, and when we stood by the body of the Sultan she made a sign to me that the Sultan was hurt, thus.”

  He prodded the tips of his fingers together and Dinah, looking up from her search among the counters for the blue/white square that meant grapes, copied him with a puzzled air.

  “I am a scholar of languages,” said Morris. “I came to Q’Kut to study the language of the marshmen. But another part of my study is to see to what extent an ape can learn language. We use these little coloured counters for words. Thus.” Morris explained the meaning of each counter as he placed it in position.

  white square: Dinah

  orange circle with hole: get/fetch/find

  black square: person

  purple rectangle: (qualifier) big

  Dinah sniffed eagerly at the array, looked round the assembly, poked a finger at the qualifier, scampered teasingly round the circle and finished by tugging triumphantly at Gaur’s white robe.

  “This is childishness,” squeaked bin Zair angrily, but he was immediately shouted down by many voices, even those of his own party. What! Interrupt a scene that would fill a hundred evenings with good talk!

  Morris clicked to Dinah who came rushing over for her reward; he showed her two small branches of grapes and gave her one which she ate while he explained the next sentence.

  yellow circle: question

  white square: Dinah

  white circle: eat

  green/blue square: banana

  He laid the second branch of grapes beside it. Dinah sniffed rapidly, compared the grapes with the noun-square, snickered scornfully and sna
tched out of Morris’s hand the large red circle which meant “No.”

  She watched Morris with dark, excited eyes as she ate the second lot of grapes, already thrilling to her thrilled audience. He explained a new sentence:

  white square: Dinah

  orange circle with hole: get/fetch/find

  black square with gold hand: Sultan

  He could see she was puzzled. She sniffed the message several times, turned the black square over to see if she could thus convert a king to a commoner, chattered a little, pouted, and loped off to inspect the audience. She paused momentarily at the throne, perhaps reminded of scenes where Hadiq had been present with his father; she also hesitated a short time over Gaur, and longer over the old fat sheikh; at last she came to the inert body of bin Zair’s nephew and possibly it was that that reminded her. At any rate she came scampering back to Morris, prodding her finger-tips together, and then hunted through the counters for the purple circle with the hole. It didn’t take her long to arrange her two-word sentence.

  black square with gold hand: Sultan

  purple circle with hole: hurt/be hurt

  A whispering sigh rose from the council as Morris explained the meaning. The hunt was up. Bin Zair’s thin, grey hand combed ceaselessly at his beard. Nobody looked at him direct.

  Unfortunately Dinah didn’t make the next step of her own account, so Morris, rather than lose the momentum of the trial, had to ask her a leading question:

  yellow circle: question

  black square: person

  purple circle with hole: hurt/be hurt

  black square with gold hand: Sultan

  Dinah considered the problem with a protruding lower lip, judiciously nodding her head up and down as if to shake her thoughts into a pattern. Morris offered her only the yes and no symbols, placing them equidistant from her; and though she was slow in coming to her conclusion her arm in the end snaked out with no hesitation and snatched up the large green circle. The room released its breath. Morris had intended to explain, if they got this far, that Dinah didn’t connect the darts with the act of firing the guns, and that therefore if she said a man had hurt the Sultan that man must actually have struck him, but he sensed that the audience was not in a mood for logic. Even Dinah, when he offered her a few more grapes, seemed more interested in the game than the reward. Perhaps she too felt the human lust for drama, the quickened pulse of the closing hunt. They had already used all the symbols Morris needed for his final question but he held them up again to explain their names and her eyes followed each one to its location in the line of meaning.

  white square: Dinah

  orange circle with hole: get/fetch/find

  black square: person

  purple circle with hole: hurt

  black square with gold hand: Sultan

  Relative clauses had once been a bugbear. A year ago Morris had been brooding on grammatical devices to obviate them; but suddenly, between session and session, Dinah had sorted the problem out for herself, poking the symbols out of the straight until the two halves of the sentence could be read along different lines. By now there was an established grammatical convention whereby relative sentences went at right-angles, the symbol on the corner (in this case the black square) containing in itself the relative link. Her discovery of this principle had been probably the most exciting moment in Morris’s life, both for the logical beauty of it, and for the realisation that there might be no limit to her abilities.

  So now he was perfectly confident that she would understand the message; he was less sure that her memory would be up to the task of recognition—after all, he well knew how long it takes a quite intelligent human to learn to distinguish one chimpanzee from another. He watched with real anxiety as she at last nosed up from the symbols and looked round at the hushed Arabs.

  Slowly, walking on her knuckles, she sidled across the circle and peered into the face of a man with a green headcloth and a straggly dark wisp of beard. He shrank away; his throat worked as if there was a scream imprisoned there, but Dinah only chattered in a dissatisfied fashion, came back to the message, read it again and started off in a different direction.

  Her progress was far from systematic. Sometimes she went straight across the circle and then back to the man she had just inspected; often she would dart back to Morris as if to check that she was doing the right thing; when she did this he gave her a few more grapes, which she ate slowly as she zig-zagged across the bright mosaic floor. The process cannot have lasted more than a few minutes, but suddenly in the middle of it Morris experienced a shuddering shock of recognition—something like the spasm of fierce wakefulness that shakes a man back to this world just before he falls asleep—or as if the lobes of his brain, having been fractionally out of phase, had jerked back to full sympathy. All this had happened before. On Gal-Gal a man had watched his life or death being decided by the erratic movements of an animal, a trained animal, to and fro across an arena ringed by silent, intent spectators. Morris, after his bout of activism, had watched his fate with an apathy close to accidie; and so did bin Zair watch now. The difference was that the duck on Gal-Gal had not yet eaten its poison; whereas Dinah had long been eating hers, day by day, from Morris’s own hand, the ancient poison of words.

  There must have been something unnoticeable about bin Zair, an inherent camouflage that might have made a marvellous hunter out of him if his life had not been spent on the track of more illusory game. Dinah only spotted him as if by accident, grey and silent on the cushions. Her glance flicked towards him as she was crossing the arena, and away. She continued half a pace on her path, then froze. Very slowly, as if she herself was the hunted creature, her head swung back towards bin Zair, her left hand staying poised in the air for the next pace. She stared at him for one of those unmeasurable times that was probably only half a heartbeat; then she was darting across the floor to him, pulling at his robe, hooting with excitement.

  Bin Zair must have been ready for her. Even before the Arabs broke into excited chatter and applause his curved dagger was out and striking. He was old but very quick—Morris’s eye only registered when the blow was over that at the tip of the gunmetal blue curve of the blade something sticky and black glistened.

  But Dinah was quick too; the blow, aimed at her ribs, caught her glancingly above the wrist as she shied away. She screamed and raced to Morris, flinging herself into his arms and showing him the red, inch-long slash through the dark hair. He clutched at her, dragged the wound to his mouth and sucked. His mouth was full of blood. He spat it out and sucked frenziedly while she struggled. She was very strong but he shifted his grip and managed to hold her, sucking and spitting. In his mind’s eye he saw the deft blow again, and remembered how neatly bin Zair had plucked the gun from the hands of the young man at the earlier Council meeting, and confused both movements with something he had not seen, the blow that had struck the Sultan down. His lips were very sore. Bristly little hairs filled his mouth, as when a toothbrush starts to disintegrate. A hand shook him by the shoulder.

  “Lord,” said Gaur’s deep voice, “you cannot suck the poison from the wound . . .”

  Morris looked up, dull and hopeless. Dinah wriggled and bucked in his grasp. The dagger floated in front of his face with a drop of blood drying on the surface of the poisonous smear.

  “This poison has died,” said Gaur. “See.”

  A black finger-nail pinched at the blacker ooze and broke through. Now Morris could see the inner stickiness under the hardened outer skin. Gaur squeezed and black fresh globules of the stuff were forced through to the surface.

  “Now it is alive again,” he said, and tossed the weapon away. Probably he had weighed it in his hand while Morris had been sucking at Dinah’s arm, for though few Arab daggers are any use for throwing this one flew straight to where bin Zair sat erect on the cushions, silent and waiti
ng judgment. Morris, still in his daze of shock and effort, did not actually see it strike, but he saw bin Zair flinch, recover and with a careful hand draw the dagger from his thigh, leaving a streak of blood on his white robe. Everyone fell silent. With difficulty the old man rose to his feet and looked round the ring of them, bowing his head slightly when he came to Hadiq.

  “It was Allah’s will,” he squeaked. He turned and limped away.

  “Shall I pick him off?” called Anne in clear, clipped tones from the gallery.

  “No,” sighed Morris.

  Four hours, he thought. You take four hours to die. That man killed Kwan. He killed my friend Kwan. Now he’s dying the same way himself, and what he wanted to happen is going to happen anyway.

  Dinah whimpered and he realised he was still holding her with all his strength. He let go. She looked with horror and disbelief at her arm, still puckered and bleeding. To distract her he peeled a banana and gave it to her. She had begun to eat it left-handed without much relish when her whole body stiffened as if with cramp in his arms. Her eyes remained open but the banana slipped from her hand.